MetaVR Announces New Afghanistan 3D Terrain and the Release of Virtual Reality Scene Generator Version 5.5

To meet the needs of training NATO soldiers for warfare in Afghanistan, MetaVR has built 3D geospecific terrain covering 9,600 square kilometers, featuring a high-resolution virtual village with over 500 buildings in the Afghan province of Kabul. This virtual terrain is available in MetaVR's round-earth and flat-earth formats for use with Virtual Reality Scene Generator(tm) (VRSG(tm)) for simulation and training, with particular emphasis on identifying and defeating IEDs using resources from combined military branches and nations. The terrain is also delivered with correlated SAF databases in CTDB and OTF formats.

Unlike the simplified, flattened terrain used to simulate urban environments in most image generators and video games, MetaVR's Afghan village is set within mountains, complex terrain of varying elevation, and cave complexes enabling realistic training scenarios for operations in mountainous villages. This virtual terrain, built with MetaVR Terrain Tools for ESRI ArcGIS, includes 1,120 square kilometers of 60 cm Digital Globe commercial satellite source imagery and 90 meter elevation posts and features a highly detailed 2 x 2 km inset terrain patch of a geospecific Afghan village. The effective terrain elevation resolution is much higher in the village areas as the construction of inferred cultural features from the geospecific imagery such as roads, buildings, courtyards, tree line, and crops further define the elevation relief. This terrain is built entirely from commercial, non-export controlled source data. Using MetaVR's new terrain work flow process, additional terrain areas can be readily constructed.

The modeled village is based on the village of Khairabad in the southern part of the Kabul province. Khairabad, situated at an altitude of 1,843 meters, is located approximately 10-15 kilometers south of the Kabul city center, next to Qalai Naeem in the Char Asiab district. This virtual village and its surrounding mountainous terrain give users the ability to conduct ground combat simulations, such as sniper and forward air controller (JTAC) exercises, with a high degree of realism. Real-time recordings of a JTAC exercise scenario and other warfighter training scenarios based on the Afghanistan virtual terrain, can be viewed on MetaVR's web site.

MetaVR's Afghanistan 3D terrain, built in collaboration with Simthetiq and VR Group, is available free of charge in MetaVR's terrain formats and SAF formats to all US Government and NATO agency and contractor customers (for official use only) on active software maintenance (VRSG version 5.5 required).

The release of MetaVR VRSG version 5.5 contains several new features, enhancements, and 3D content:

- Additions to the military vehicle 3D model library. Approximately 135 new models have been added to MetaVR's 3D content library of military entities including a set of 29 technical vehicle models (modified armed commercial vehicles). These new technical models represent vehicles that are in use in Iraq and Afghanistan. New military entities also include a full set of MineResistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) production vehicles, a photo-specific model of the M1A2 TUSK, and photorealistic F-15 and F-16 models.

- Sensor enhancements include significantly improved rendering performance of IR modes, and the ability to control sensor effects on per viewport as well as per channel basis. New digital zoom capability simulates the expected blocky, aliased artifacts of a sensor as the pixel boundaries become visible at high levels of zoom. New digital compression artifacts simulate the effects of a sensor's transmitted video.

- Enhanced direct video feed from VRSG to devices such as the Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receiver (ROVER) to include a higher quality and higher performance MPEG codec with reduced latency, support for a broader set of resolutions, support for EG 0601.1 KLV metadata encoding, and the ability to record at 60 Hz. Also new in version 5.5 is a plugin for recording uncompressed AVI video for the highest possible quality.

- Sky enhancements include an ephemeris model to calculate sun position, moon position, and moon phase from date, time, and geographic location. Lighting conditions can now be automatically calculated from date, time, and geographic location. Night scenes now also include a 40,000 light-point star field.

- Ability to automatically generate cultural feature lighting from shape files of road networks. This feature, and the moon disk and star field features, enable trainees in a simulator to navigate in a nocturnal exercise with accurate celestial references, and provide realistic stimulation of actual night vision goggles.

- Support for up to 8 independent, concurrent, steerable light lobes for video cards that support Pixel Shader Model 3.0.

- Enhancements to volumetric clouds, which include improved randomization and new absorption model for more realistic cloud illumination.

- New shot effect feature that enables bullet marks to be created on dynamic entities or static culture.

- New scope view feature that simulates looking at a scene through a sniper scope.

- Detail texture capability for Metadesic-formatted terrain.

- Ability to generate geometric ground detail such as grass, vegetation, or other surface details dynamically using the feature ID attribute of OpenFlight databases prior to conversion to MetaVR's flat-earth MDX format.

- Support for Polhemus Scout head tracker.

- New plugins to support distortion correction for OmniMap and Elumens dome displays.

The release of version 5.5 of MetaVR VRSG is available to customers on active maintenance. Contact sales@metavr.com for more information, or see http://www.metavr.com